Kwmae Ture was born Stokely Carmichael in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on June 29, 1941. His father was a carpenter, and his parents, with two of their daughters, traveled to the United States. Ture remained in Trinidad, living with two aunts and his grandmother. In 1952 at age 11, he joined his parents in the Harlem section of New York, where his
father held a second job as a cab driver to help support his wife, Mae, and children. Ture had journeyed to the US at a decisive period. This was the eve of the Civil Rights Era, and the young man who had grown up in a West Indian environment surrounded by blacks had never experienced racism quite like the type in the US. In 1960, after seeing pictures of blacks sitting in at lunch counters in the South, Ture decided to become more politically active. He rejected scholarships from several predominantly white colleges and entered the predominantly black Howard University in Washington, D.C.
During his freshman year he took part in freedom rides, integrated bus trips to the South to challenge segregated interstate travel. In 1964, graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, he became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually rising to head the Civil Rights organization. As the Civil Rights struggle continued into the mid-1960s, the tensions on either
side of the battlefield began to mount. In the South whites became more vicious in their attacks. In the North, as Blacks began to cry for freedom there also, whites reacted with stiff opposition. Many Blacks had had enough of waiting for white America to give them justice. In Harlem a protest march against a police station turned into a revolt with guerilla attacks by Blacks on white police. In Brooklyn, Rochester, Chicago, and Philadelphia, molotov cocktails and rebellion were replacing picket signs and demonstrations. After the disastrous Selma March of 1965, even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was disturbed that the movement had not increased the standard of living of the masses, was becoming disillusioned. All of this did not go unnoticed by the young Civil Rights workers. They had joined the various organizations expecting so much more than had been achieved by this time.
Ture and SNCC with great attention watched as Civil Rights leaders like Fanni Lou Hamer and D.U.
Pullium were severely beaten. They watched as Herbert Lee and Louis Allen were beaten and eventually killed. On August 11, 1965 the degradations, oppression and rage exploded in the Watts Rebellion. For six days Blacks fought white policemen, firemen, and National Guardsmen in pitched battles. When the dust had cleared, the Civil Rights struggle was changed forever. After an attempted assassination of Civil Rights leader James Meredith, a protest march was held in Mississippi. The leader of the march was none other than the young Ture. At the march it was Ture who uttered the historic words, "Black Power." They were two simple words which both the masses of whites and the blacks would hear for the first time. "Black Power" rolled like thunder throughout America and was picked up as a rallying cry. The movement had taken a new turn which would change the politics of the Black world forever.
Ture resigned as chairman of the SNCC in May 1967 and became affiliated with the Black Panthers which had been founded by Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale in 1966. He gained an honorary title and for a short period worked within the organization.
However he became disenchanted with the Panthers after Eldridge Cleaver's espoused the belief that coalitions could be formed with liberal whites. He left the party and, in an open letter, said the party had become "dogmatic" in its ideology. Forced to flee the country in exile after pressure from the FBI, Ture left the United States in 1969 to live in Guinea after he was barred admittance into his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago by an American-intimidated government. He changed his name to Kwame Ture, taken from Kwame Nkrumah, who is regarded by many as the then father of modern Pan-Africanism, and Ahmed Sekou Ture, the leader of Guinea. He founded the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and by 1971 he was advocating a homeland in a united Africa for oppressed blacks of the world.
Kwame Ture continued in his activism of uniting Africans on the continent and abroad until his death from prostate cancer in 1998 at the age of 57. Revolutionary groups, activists, diplomats, family and friends from around the world converged
on the West African country of Guinea Nov. 22 1998 to bid farewell to Pan-African freedom fighter Kwame Ture who died Nov. 15 His contribution to the politics of Black America and eventually the Black world is beyond substantial. He remains one of the most prominent icons of the 1960s and the Black Power Movement. As one writer put it, "His determination to transform America and Africa, and his prodding of black Americans to look beyond their country in the fight for racial justice, will be his most enduring legacy. " (Photo and Information courtesy of Kwame Ture: Life of a legend by James Muhammad of The Final Call (11/24/98), and the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party.)
1998-A Declaration to the World by Kwame Ture